VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 5: Orlok

Orlok's route is unlocked at the same time as Yang's, by the completion of Nicola or Dante's route, which at first felt like an unusual step, but once I discovered he and Liliana spend almost half the route with the Lao-Shu I could see some kind of logic behind it.

Nicola and Dante are both part of the Falzone, and their routes serve as an introduction to the status quo of the city and how the various characters and factions fit together. Yang and Orlok are a showcase of the Lao-Shu side of the story and why the tension in Burlone has come to a boiling point at this particular moment in time.

But just as the opening routes and the first set of unlocked routes can be grouped together by mafia family, you can group Nicola and Yang's routes as being completely secular and unrelated to the greater story, while Dante and Orlok's can't help but be tangled up by all the church intrigue. Thus, while I don't think it makes much of a difference whether Yang's route is played second, third, or fourth (with Gilbert being a mandatory fifth due to route-lock order), playing Orlok before Dante would be an incredibly different experience.

I don't think it would necessarily be a bad one, but the player would be working with a different set of assumptions for most of the route and I'd be curious how that changes the experience.

Playing Orlok's route after Dante's, I expected to see more of Bishop Rosberg's plan for how he intended to use Liliana, since, as mentioned in Dante's route, Liliana is only one of two things necessary to break the seal. Rosberg intended to leave Dante alive, which made it seem as though his plan was to blackmail or otherwise coerce Dante into cooperating, giving him the two things he needed to access the relic. Because if all he wanted was to keep the artifact sealed away, he could simply kill Liliana and be done with it, and Liliana by herself is useless without the Falzone part of the equation, which Rosberg most certainly knows.

As if intended to pair with Dante's storyline, we again begin the route with Orlok meeting up with Liliana and trying to speak with her away from the church. But this time he succeeds at taking her away at their first meeting (with Lili being oddly forgiving of the guy who just slugged her mother figure of Sister Sofia to escape), and since this happens in the streets instead of later at the church, there's no chance for Sister Sofia to call Dante for backup.

Though Lili isn't keen on hanging out with the Lao-Shu, Orlok is working with them under Bishop Rosberg's orders, and asks her to manage. This is where the story diverges from Dante's route and can give a player the wrong impression. We know from Dante's route that Orlok is not fulfilling his proper duty of supporting the Falzone family and that it's largely due to his handler (Rosberg), but we don't really know what he's been told or why until his own route, and it's a bit weird.

Orlok tells Liliana that she is a saint that Bishop Rosberg has seen in a prophecy and that she is destined to bring an end to all the fighting in Burlone. He tells her that he's protecting her from the Falzone, which actually isn't that hard to believe when Dante storms the Lao-Shu's hideout with all his men to reach her, but it's a little unclear what the game wants the player to think, especially since many of the early POV scenes with Dante make it clear that Liliana is not to be hurt and he's trying to protect her.

Possibly more than any other route, because Orlok is not part of any of the mafia families, the machinations of the Falzone, Visconti, and Lao-Shu involve facts Liliana and Orlok never learn about. There's even one point after they've left the Lao-Shu (because Yang reveals he would happily kill her if it suited him), that Orlok finds himself being attacked by the Visconti and he has no idea why. At least he knows why the Lao-Shu and the Falzone are pissed at him, but having all three mafia families after his neck is a little much.

The player knows why the Visconti are after him (Orlok ruined an important business deal for Gilbert while trying to save Liliana from the Falzone), but Orlok and by extension Liliana, are largely in the dark.

Orlok's route requires a lot of POV scenes from other characters to make it work, mostly from Dante's point of view, though occasionally others (like we see the ruined deal through Gilbert). Though the Lao-Shu are bad guys in this route as they are in almost every other, this is the only route that positions Dante as the final antagonist, and it makes sense given that it's his duty to guard Liliana and the relic, and Orlok is working against that for most of the game.

But to make Dante more unforgiving, the game circles back to a detail I didn't think would come up again: Who killed Dante's father? This originally came up in Nicola's route, because some of the suspicion had fallen on him, but we know it wasn't him, and given the whole mafia business, I would not have been surprised if it was a hit from the Visconti or some other deal gone wrong. But it was actually Orlok (acting under Rosberg's orders, because apparently his plan to seize Burlone away from the Falzone started some years ago), and Dante only manages to realize this due to Nicola having trouble grabbing a book on his bookshelf and triggering a memory Dante had forgotten about.

When Nicola dies protecting Dante from Orlok, the man is left without his closest confidant and seething with rage against the person who killed both his father and his cousin. Not to mention that Orlok is careening around town bringing Liliana into more danger than she's ever seen in her life, which is not what Dante wants for the Key Maiden at all.

And yes, Key Maiden. Despite the fact that Orlok calls her a saint from Rosberg's prophecy and all the Lao-Shu conveniently start spreading the word around town (to boost their reputation and shake down some money for themselves), all of that saint stuff is clearly made up hogwash that Rosberg fed them just to get a hold of Liliana. All the relic and Key Maiden backstory in Dante's route is the real deal. And when Rosberg actually arrives in town on Orlok's route, he outwardly disavows any such prophecy or connection to the Lao-Shu, but privately tells Orlok he's waiting for God to give him the rest of the prophecy so he knows their next step.

Rosberg's problem (as it has been on other routes) is that the Lao-Shu have mucked things up for him, and because he had to publicly disavow them this throws Liliana's reputation in the dump since she was hanging out with them so much. (Not that Orlok or Liliana know any of this since Lili has been hiding away ever since leaving the Lao-Shu and Orlok apparently stopped doing any information gathering at the same time.) So Rosberg decides he's going with his Plan B: have Liliana killed and her death blamed on the mafia so the citizens will rise up and run them out of town.

It seems his reasoning is that there is more than one way to capture the relic. Even if he can't unseal it with Liliana's death, if he controls Burlone, he can exert control on the Church by virtue of controlling its resting place. What is definitely clear is that he doesn't feel the Falzone are worthy of holding Burlone. Interestingly, though Liliana doesn't trust Rosberg even when Orlok thinks the world of him, she does believe that Rosberg's intentions for the city are good.

Though Rosberg occupies a fairly significant chunk of Orlok's route, we actually don't get much of a showdown with him, which is likely why we don't get a clear view of his plan. Orlok refuses to follow Rosberg's orders to kill Liliana, having fallen in love with her, so they run away, and after some misadventures, including a well done scene where Orlok struggles with his faith after having disobeyed Rosberg, Orlok manages to take down most of the Lao-Shu and the Visconti, before Dante arrives to mop-up.

Depending on whether it's the good ending or the normal ending, Dante either kills Rosberg in front of Orlok and Lili, or in the woods in the aftermath, which I didn't really mind since an old bishop who can't fight isn't really what we're looking for as the big bad in this sort of setting. The meat of the finale is really the Orlok versus Dante face-off.

Even if we know Orlok is going to win by virtue of being the love interest of the route, I figured he would win in a balanced fight anyway, because the only time Orlok has died in the other routes was when Yang tried to kill Lili and saving her distracted Orlok enough for Yang to kill him. No one has beaten the church disciple in a fair fight even though he's running around with nothing but a dagger the entire game.

So I was a little sad when in the best ending he kills Dante, who goes down as if relieved to not have to fight anymore, but I expected it. The story had pushed Dante into a position where he could not back down and death was really the only option for him that provided a satisfying ending for all of them. Though Orlok probably should pay in some fashion for all the people he's killed, Liliana has a fair point in that you can only atone while you're alive, and at least they acknowledge that wanting Orlok to live is to some degree selfish on their part.

You may have noticed that I mostly talked about the plot in Orlok's route rather than Orlok himself, and I think that's because I had trouble with Orlok as a love interest. He was raised by Rosberg and perhaps because of his natural disposition and gratitude to the man who gave him a home, his only goal in life is to better serve the bishop and his Church.

I initially thought Orlok might have been a neurodivergent character. He has trouble reading his own emotions and emotions in others, and he talks in a halting manner like he doesn't have the words fully composed in his mind before he starts speaking so he has to stop in awkward places while his brain buffers, but the more I played the more I figured this was more likely because Orlok was not well socialized than because his brain works differently, because he doesn't speak quite as awkwardly in his after story.

Orlok is a character who has led a disenfranchised life while not realizing everything he missed while being Rosberg's personal assassin, and it crushes him when he realizes how many people he's killed for a man who has been manipulating him and even asked him to kill the woman he's crushing on.

I say crushing, because Orlok is enamored with her, but I don't think he knows exactly what love means or entails. Liliana tells him multiple times in his route that she loves him, but Orlok either doesn't acknowledge it or replies that he will protect her, because protecting is what he knows how to do. It's not under the after story (which I assume is the lead-in to the sequel) and a time skip of several months that Orlok is actually able to say he loves her. By then he probably has grown enough to know, but he's too emotionally stunted in his own route for me to see him as a romantic lead.